Beethoven: Triple Concerto (CD review)

I’m not sure the world really needed another recording of
the Beethoven Triple Concerto. I know
it didn’t need another Fifth Symphony.
Nevertheless, if we have to have them, and apparently we have no say on the
subject, I cannot think of many other groups I’d more like to hear doing them
than The Knights.

The Knights are a New York-based chamber ensemble, which,
according to their Web site, is “an orchestra of friends from a broad spectrum
of the New York music world who are deeply committed to creating original,
engaging musical experiences.” Their stated goal is “to surprise audiences by
constantly seeking new approaches to music-making and new exponents of the art
form.” They strive “to play old music like it was written yesterday and inhabit
new music in a way that’s familiar and natural.” Certainly, in the several
albums I’ve heard by them (and reviewed), The Knights are accomplishing their
mission.

First up on the disc is the Triple Concerto in C majorfor
piano, violin, cello and orchestra, Op. 56, with soloists Colin Jacobsen,
violin; Jan Vogler, cello; and Antti Siirala, piano; with Jacobsen’s brother
and co-founder of The Knights, Eric Jacobsen, conducting. Beethoven wrote the Triple Concerto in 1804, and it has
remained one of the composer’s most popular pieces ever since. It is, of
course, actually a kind of orchestrated chamber trio, a sinfonia concertante
where several instruments oppose the orchestra and each other, a style that had
passed out of vogue by Beethoven’s time, although Beethoven was able to inject
a little new life into it. I suppose you could say The Knights and their
soloists also inject a little new life into the work.

Despite The Knights’ ambition to seek “new approaches” and
“surprise audiences,” their music-making is not in the extreme; the ensemble’s
rendition of things is not so new as to be eccentric or bizarre. Indeed, their
interpretations sound lively but conventional. This is Beethoven, after all,
not some avant-garde composer they can play around with too much. You’ll find
no excessively exaggerated tempos here, no inflated emphases or contrasts, no
wilful hyperbole or embellishment for the sake of being different.

I even hesitate using the word conventional to describe The Knights’ playing since the word may to
some degree imply commonness, even mediocrity, in the performance, and nothing
could be further from the truth. The Knights play with great enthusiasm and
joy, communicating their delight in the music through their evident delight in
the music-making.

The Knights play the Triple
Concerto in a quick and lively style, but not too quick or too lively. It
seems just right, as a matter of fact. The three soloists perform well with one
another, too, the cello dominant, of course, the piano perhaps a trifle large
but never overpowering, the violin always holding things together. The
instruments dart teasingly, charmingly, in and out of the musical structure.
First and foremost, this music demonstrates a friendship and a kinship among
the players, the three soloists and the orchestra accommodating that happy
relationship sweeting and fondly.

The Largo, which
is brief anyway, the players take a bit more briskly than I might have liked.
Still, they do the movement no harm, and it comes off with an appropriately
serene air, leading smoothly into the exuberance of the finale.

Set against the relatively lightweight cheerfulness of the
Triple Concerto, the disc’s
accompanying work, Beethoven’s Symphony
No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, trumpets its ominous, then gradually triumphant,
notes of fate. Perhaps Beethoven wrote the piece in defiance of fate because he
was beginning to recognize his loss of hearing by this time. As the composer
put it, “I will seize fate by the throat. It will not crush me entirely.”

The Knights, too, attempt to seize things by the throat,
imbuing it with an infectious excitement, particularly in the work’s grand conclusion.
Yet it’s the performance’s opening movement that gives me pause. In a booklet
note, oboist James Roe writes that “the first sound in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor is silence.
This monumental work begins with an eighth-note rest. Contained in that
diminutive unit of silence is the last moment of calm before fate intervenes,
the last second before learning life-changing news. It is the end of innocence
before Beethoven’s infamous four-note motif launches the fateful first
movement.” Fair enough. The trouble is that The Knights barely give anything in
the opening minutes a unit of silence or even a chance to breath, they move
along so quickly. To me the outset of the symphony appeared not so much
powerful, dramatic, or turbulent as it did a trifle perfunctory.

Nevertheless, once underway The Knights come into their
own. Their natural spontaneity takes over, and they make the piece come alive.
According to Beethoven’s own metronome markings, most recordings of the Fifth (well, most of Beethoven’s music
actually) are too slow. Even though The Knights don’t attack the piece as some
of the period-instruments crowd have, they do produce a fleet-footed
interpretation filled with plenty of energy. The entrance into the final Allegro is thrilling, if perhaps lacking
in the last bit of electricity generated by conductors like Carlos Kleiber and
Fritz Reiner. All the same, not bad.

The sound is pretty good, too. Sony recorded it in New
York City over several days in January, 2012, and because of the reduced
orchestral size, we get a reasonably transparent midrange, complemented by a
soft, warm, ambient glow from the recording venue. There’s also a good
separation of soloists in the Triple
Concerto and a moderately lifelike integration of them with the rest of the
orchestra. While I suppose there could have been a greater depth and
dimensionality to the sound and perhaps a stronger, wider dynamic response,
these are minor concerns when the playing has such multidimensionality. In the Fifth, however, we get what seems a tad
closer response with a greater impact.

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John J. Puccio

About the Author

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on The Big John and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

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When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

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